Page 94 - Olympism in Socialism

To put it in a nutshell: the sports performance
and the sensation it caused were commercialized
in this case also. If this world champion, however,
falls into oblivion for a second time, things may
turn out pretty bad for him.
The very first Olympic winner of the GDR was
a boxer, Wolfgang Behrendt. He is a sports
photographer today, and it is obvious that he is
judged by the readers of the newspaper he works
for by the quality of his photographs only. Nobody
would be willing to accept bad photos just
because they were taken by a former Olympic
winner.
The Olympic winner in ski-jumping, at Squaw
Valley, 1960, Helmut Recknagel, is a veterinarian
today. He is responsible for the hygienic
supervision of all sausage-producing enterprises
of a district in the GDR. Nobody would connive at
a violation of the hygienic provisions for the
reason that the responsible man had been the.
most famous ski-jumper of a whole decade.
Dieter Bokeloh, one of Recknagel’s team
members in those years, now works at a turning-
lathe in a factory of his native town, and it can be
taken for granted that his colleagues would not
be-prepared to do his work for him just because
he used to achieve great sports successes for the
GDR.
Anna-Maria Mueller won an Olympic victory
as a tobogganist in Sapporo, 1972. Today she is
a sales assistant in a chemist’s shop in Berlin and
nobody indeed would take the wrong medicine
from her because she used to be a celebrated
tobogganist.
Ex-cycling champion Gustav-Adolf Schur
does a responsible job as -a sports official.
Furthermore, he has been a Deputy to the
People’s Chamber, the GDR’s supreme people’s

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